Metacognition For Radicals
Metacognition For Radicals | On Essentialism If you don’t know what essentialism is, you can’t have a full understanding of racism, sexism or any other social justice issue. The concept of essentialism has many contexts; ones included here are relevant to social justice activism. --- Context #1: #generativity | Child-Development (mental development) In terms of how very young children perceive the world, they don’t yet have the capacity for well-informed ideas, but do the capacity for a fuzzy interpretation of the world. In other words, they only have the capacity for ‘essentialized’ ideas of the world. ’Essentialist thinking’ in this Child-Development context reflects a low-information stage of mental development. Emotion is fully functioning, while logic is not. ” The implications of psychological essentialism are numerous. Prejudiced individuals have been found to endorse exceptionally essential ways of thinking, suggesting that essentialism may perpetuate exclusion among social groups23 (Morton, Hornsey & Postmes, 2009). This may be due to an over-extension of an *essential-biological mode of thinking* stemming from cognitive development.24 Paul Bloom of Yale University has stated that "one of the most exciting ideas in cognitive science is the theory that people have a default assumption that things, people and events have invisible essences that make them what they are. Experimental psychologists have argued that essentialism underlies our understanding of the physical and social worlds, and developmental and cross-cultural psychologists have proposed that it is instinctive and universal. We are natural-born essentialists."25 Scholars suggest that the categorical nature of essentialist thinking predicts the use of stereotypes and can be targeted in the application of stereotype prevention26 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism --- Positive/Negative Parenting example. All children begin by thinking in an essentialized way, but children don’t get everything wrong. A child with positive behavior necessarily has used positive essentialist thinking. The significant upshot here is that essentialist thinking is mode of thinking that everyone, (adults included) uses from time to time. Making a ‘rough estimate’ is a form of essentialist thinking. While adults at times use essentialist thinking even when they shouldn’t, for a range of time children are completely limited to essentialist thinking. One positive/negative example is a child taught to views animals with an empathetic outlook may come to love animals, while a child taught with an unempathetic outlook may learn to fear and/or objectify animals. Emotions trump logic in such situations. Empathy is a consequence of compassion, so in the positive example compassion is at the root of the resulting logic. In the negative example the emotional root is self-interest. The emotional root determines the behavioral outcome. The difference of the root emotions compassion and self-interest lead to different outcomes in consequential emotions such as Fear and Happiness. With compassion at the root a child may fear for the safety of an animal. With self-interest at the root a sound the animal makes may provoke fear in the child. With compassion at the root a child may derive happiness sharing compassion with animals. With self-interest as the root a significant example is that a child might learn to derive happiness hurting animals. --- Context #2: #activistunity --- Sexism Consider the evolution of self-identity and the cognitive development of a child. A child comes into the world with a fuzzy view of everything. A child is assigned their role in the world while they are only capable of essentialist thinking. What you tell a child about gender is what they’ll believe it is. You have the option of creating a stereotyped or a universal interpretation of gender. From a compassionate view: “All people are the same where it counts. Males and Females just have a few different parts.” From a less mindful view: “Men are the authority in this household”. --- Racism What you tell a child about race is what they’ll believe it is. You have the option of creating a stereotyped or a universal interpretation of race. From a compassionate view: “All people are the same. All people were dark-skinned originally in Africa, and we got lighter skinned as we moved to other parts of the world. That was a long time ago. Now people from everywhere go everywhere else. That’s why we see difference sorts of people in our country” From a less mindful view: “It’s best to stay with your own kind”. --- Context #3: #criticalthinking | Critical Thinking for Activism Psychological Essentialism becomes a basis for deconstructing ideas as well as objects, people and events. Essentialism is something I look for in the character of an idea or belief. These are the 4 components of an essentialized idea (reworked a little from standard nerdspeak). 1. (function) --- “this thing/person/idea does only this” 2. (innate limit) --- “this thing/person/idea is only good for one purpose” 3. (unchanging) --- “this thing/person/idea will never change” 4. (difference) --- “similarities to other things/people/ideas don’t matter, because all that matters is the difference” I don’t want to dwell on those other than to say it’s a low-information idea. Generally in an essentialized idea, the understanding of the function of anything is limited in one context because the person doesn’t understand deeper contexts. It’s unchanging in one context because it’s assumed people have a limited understanding of cause and effect relationships. It’s assumed that there’s a level of black or white thinking that accentuates differences. The real key for critical thinking is component #3. (unchanging) In this context it translates to not paying attention to cause and effect, which is pretty much job #1 for critically thinking social justice activists. --- Examples Some example of essentialist thinking in adults. “You know how men are”, “You know how women are”. “You know how dark-skinned people are”, “You know how light-skinned people are”, “You know how Americans are” With regard to sexism and racism, essentialism erroneously connects biological features such as gender and skin-color to innate behavior. With regard to nationalism, essentialism erroneously connects nationality to innate behavior. Some example of essentialist thinking in activism. “All we need to do is follow Anarchism”, “All we need to do is follow Socialism” “All we need to do is vote Green” “All we need to do is vote for Bernie” “All we need to do is boycott the election” With regard to sectarianism and partisanship, essentialism erroneously connects all social justice solutions to a single concept. My partisan essentialist idea: “All activism needs is a critical thinking movement” My more rational idea: “Activism desperately needs a critical thinking movement” Metacognition For Radicals | Liberal Celebrities | Hyperreality I can't listen to Bill Maher anymore. It's more than I don't care what he thinks, but I see how dangerous he is for social justice activism. I think of him as part of the 'contagion' that normalizes the structural violence of U.S. culture. Mainstream media is a farce. Maher gives the farcical Liberal narrative to counter the farcical Conservative narrative, and everyone you hear in any debate thinks that and corporate media are the pinnacle of human civilization. This is a case of the medium being the message. The media is capitalism, in that it normalizes it's own completely fabricated narrative in the perceptions of viewers. The logical narrative of society the media portrays ignores the causes of structural violence. The political oligarchy sets the agenda for the Liberal narrative. What you hear from Maher are ideas that have been primed and framed. Maher is not even a reformer, he's an actor. He gets rich off the system while giving a wacky pro-war, pro-capitalist view of reforming society. He's reacting to a phony system in a phony, yet lively and entertaining way. “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” ~Noam Chomsky, The Common Good TV is not reality especially when it comes to politics. ~t #‎criticalthinking‬ see Hyperreality Metacognition For Radicals | Subjective vs Objective | Equivocation There's an important difference between subjectivity and objectivity. "subjective: existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought" "objective: not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased" See that interpretations of political group-identities are often wholly subjective, while the actions of political group-identities have objective consequences. To get to the truth, judge things by objective reality, not subjective opinions. Effective political analysis must deal with the objective consequences of what political groups do. --- Using 'Liberals' as an example here, but the logic is the same for any group-identity We deal with the objective actions of those who identify as 'Liberals', not any one persons subjective idea of what the word 'Liberal' should mean to the rest of the world. If there are millions of people acting a certain way, while calling themselves by a certain label, that's what the label comes to mean. --- Multiple Contexts Overwhelmingly most words have more than one context. "polysemy: capacity for a sign (such as a word, phrase, or symbol) to have multiple meanings (contexts)" That's a seriously important concept in political analysis. There's no problem using both a subjective and objective context of 'Liberal', or any group-identity. The problem comes if people only understand one context. What you'll see is people who have the idea "Well, I'm a Liberal, so everything I do is right and just". When people delude themselves in that way, they unwittingly contribute to structural violence caused by Liberal Democrats. The same can be said for any group-identity. The way to avoid that sort of delusion is to put a priority on the objective consequences of political groups. --- You'll see that with any individual who identifies with any political group. It's *cognitive bias*. That's how people think. It takes a lot of practice and humility to recognize ones own cognitive biases. --- Equivocation One tip is that anytime you see a political disagreement, look for that shifting of context. One person may only know one context of a particular definition. When nerds debate, you often see them say "Define..blah blah blah", because they want to know which definition the other person is using. Mixing the contexts of definitions is called 'equivocation'. Sometimes it's done purposely in propaganda, sometimes it happens unwittingly in honest dialogs. (Adding to the Leftist circular firing squad effect) ~t "Equivocation ("to call by the same name") is classified as an informal logical fallacy. It is the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning or sense (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time). It generally occurs with polysemic words (words with multiple meanings)." Metacognition for Radicals | Hydraulics of Emotions Does a person lose self-esteem when they change from a sexist or racist to an anti-sexist or anti-racist? No they do not. What happens there? A "change of heart" is when ones level of self-esteem is maintained through a change of logic. --Needs Self-esteem is one of the basic needs. It's the emotional component of self-esteem that must be filled. The logical component is changeable over time. A change of heart is actually a change of mind and behavior. The emotional force of compassion changes beliefs which initially derive self-esteem from supremacy, into beliefs that derive self-esteem from an empathetic identity. People *redefine* themselves as a good people. --Internal/External Emotional Force. A "change of heart" takes internal emotional force. It's a persons heart that directs a change of their mind. What creates internal emotional force? Initially, it's from upbringing. One must be taught to be a supremacist. --Seeing -Exposure Both the initial belief and the changed belief are rooted in the observed behavior of others. Getting geeky with it, Mirror Neurons handling perceptions of others. A child is taught largely by observing the behavior of role models. An adult is generally effected by social connections. A 'change of heart' happens after observing behavior that first looks like better logic is eventually adopted. External emotional force in this example can come via respected individuals, as well as friends, groups and larger society. --Learning -Repetition The geeky term for what kicks in next is Long Term Potentiation which handles the learning process. Changing from supremacist to empathetic is not like creating one neuron and deleting another, it's a matter of strengthening different existing neural connections. That takes repetition of the seeing/learning process. ~t http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation -------------------------------------------------------